Chapter 744: The Self-Awakened Body Cultivator Standing at the Peak of the Path
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 744: The Self-Awakened Body Cultivator Standing at the Peak of the Path
As the topic of the research project regarding Self-Generated Mana spread, many witches found their interest piqued.
It wasn't that they were usually uninterested; rather, it was something they rarely bothered to notice. To a witch, this feeling was akin to suddenly paying attention to why one breathes.
The physical talent of Self-Generated Mana was like an instinct to them. From the moment they ascended to become Transcendent Witches, it was born naturally within them. It felt like a rebirth; the mana produced by the body was like a newborn taking its first breath of fresh air in the world.
Many witches gathered privately, calling upon their close friends to investigate the subject of Self-Generated Mana. After all, the concept was a foundational element of many subjects they had already studied, such as Great Witch Projects, Mana Projects, and Mana Source Projects.
However, after much reflection and searching through records, many witches discovered that the physical talent of Self-Generated Mana was not considered an official subject, nor did it belong as a sub-topic under any Great Witch Project.
In other words, it was a foundational concept that seemed impossible to research—there was no clear starting point. It lacked the researchability of a typical subject that extended from a base. Or perhaps, the subject had always existed but had been hidden away.
Why was it hidden?
The witches who had begun researching Self-Generated Mana out of curiosity soon found the answer.
They simply had no way to begin. They couldn't understand it; they had no idea how to even conceptualize it. Many witches couldn't even define what kind of physical talent Self-Generated Mana actually was.
Was it a physical constitution?
Its manifestation suggested so, but it could not be replicated or acquired through standard constitution research methods.
Since it couldn't be replicated, was it an innate talent?
It couldn't be obtained through Innate Reincarnation Spells either...
So, that wasn't it. It was granted upon ascending to Transcendent status. One couldn't exactly claim that becoming a Transcendent Witch was the literal beginning of a new life, could they?
Was it a spell?
Compared to similar mana-recovery or mana-replenishment spells, the idea of a spell effect becoming part of one's bloodline... that didn't make sense either.
Then, was it a Body Cultivation ability?
Some witches knew that the essence of "Witchification" was a form of Body Cultivation. they believed Self-Generated Mana was essentially a Body Cultivation power, but they had no way to prove it. After all, that answer was merely something they had heard in passing.
But what kind of Body Cultivation power was it?
Again, no witch could answer. Some only made the connection because of Xiao Han, the Self-Awakened Body Cultivator, combined with the paper the Academy Dean had published the previous year. This only barely proved that Self-Generated Mana had some "direct" correlation with being a Self-Awakened Body Cultivator.
However, they were not Self-Awakened Body Cultivators, nor were they even Body Cultivation Witches. Of course, the Body Cultivation path of Witchification was not classified as "Body Cultivation" by witches.
Many witches gave up at this point. After all, they were only driven by a fleeting interest. It was unwise to continue wasting time on something they knew they couldn't achieve.
Yet, there were still many witches willing to delve deeper.
As for why... witches had eternal lifespans, and those with nothing to do were simply bored.
They revisited the paper that mentioned Xiao Han, even preparing to find that Transcendent Witch to hold a discussion. However, they found that she was in the Experimental Zone... and many of these bored witches didn't even have the permission to enter.
They could only look at the paper again.
It mentioned the "Metamorphosis Rebirth Art," a technique derived from the Resurrection Spell that could influence the essence of life to a limited degree. Currently, this art had almost no ability to resurrect the dead. Its effects were primarily targeted at the physical body, using the body as a medium to exert a limited influence on the essence of life—namely, the soul essence or the soul itself.
The Metamorphosis Rebirth Art was a secondary derived spell; the primary derivation was the Incubation Rebirth spell.
The main purpose of creating this spell was... to create a physique suitable for a brand-new Body Cultivation method.
Currently, this Metamorphosis Rebirth Art had achieved phased success in the first stage of modifying this physique...
And that Body Cultivation method was called the Mana Source Body Cultivation Method.
Yet another concept they had never heard of.
Looking at these obscure concepts, many witches were left in a daze. Since they had never encountered this knowledge before, they naturally couldn't understand what it meant.
Furthermore, in their fixed mindset... weren't Mana Sources used for casting spells?
Had things really evolved to the point where they could be used for Body Cultivation?
* * *
Inside the Body Cultivation room.
After practicing for such a long time, my mastery of the Body Cultivation Secret Classic was steadily improving.
I had essentially tried all nine branches of Body Arts, but I couldn't master the Martial Runes for every single one within a few days. Thus, my talent in Body Arts showed some bias.
However, this bias wasn't particularly pronounced. In the face of my powerful Self-Awakened Body Cultivator abilities, the gap was narrowed significantly. To me, it wasn't so much a gap in talent as it was a distance between what I liked and what I didn't.
I was confident that I could successfully resonate with all the Martial Runes. At the latest, I would achieve this goal before the start of the school term.
At that moment, I threw another punch. It was the most basic offensive Body Art, "Sky Opening Break." As the punch flew out, my power condensed to the extreme. The wind from the punch didn't form the internal energy trails of my previous strikes. Instead, as the punch ended, the air in front of my fist seemed to be compressed by an extreme force, letting out a terrifying sonic boom.
This was pure physical power, not typical Body Cultivation internal energy.
In the past, I didn't know how to control my own strength, so every punch came with internal energy special effects. But now I understood that those were merely the result of imperfect power control.
Furthermore, the more I practiced Sky Opening Break, the more I realized it had no fixed forms. From beginning to end, it was about the exertion of force and the coordination of the body. The actual move depended entirely on the needs of the attack. If there was no specific need, it was a simple straight punch. If there was a need, it could essentially be any form of attack.
No wonder Sister Bai said the Body Arts within the Body Cultivation Secret Classic had no specific bias. She likely meant this characteristic. Most Body Arts began with specific stances; one could see the characteristics and style of the art from its most basic movements.
The trade-off was that the threshold for learning and understanding it was much higher.
But for me, these were not thresholds at all.
As I continued to punch, my movements became so fluid they looked like an ornamental martial arts performance—or they would have, if not for the explosive air bursts following every strike.
As the movements continued, my nearly formless footwork combined with the "Shadow-Stepping" Body Art, which focused on speed. I was like a fluttering butterfly, and the massive Body Cultivation room almost felt too small for me to fully unleash my movements.
Gradually, two phantoms began to emerge. These were the Martial Runes resonated by the Body Arts. These two phantoms represented the "Attack" and "Speed" Body Cultivation runes.
Recently, I had discovered that if two different Martial Runes achieved perfect coordination during execution, it might be possible for them to form a "Composite Rune"!
Of course, this was just a "possibility" I felt after studying Runology. So, I had been trying to verify it. Although I hadn't succeeded yet, I was firm in my belief that this was an achievable hypothesis.
The reason I hadn't succeeded was mainly that I hadn't formed a "Body Cultivation mindset." After all, I wasn't some martial arts genius; I just had the "Self-Awakened Body Cultivator" cheat code.
In the field of spells, forming a composite rune only required the characteristics of the runes to be in sync, allowing them to be combined through a special method. But the "special method" for Martial Runes was the resonance itself—the perfect coordination between Body Arts.
This certainly wasn't something one could master in such a short period of practicing Body Arts, right?
After another failed attempt, I sighed and stopped.
In truth, exploring the path of composite Martial Runes didn't have much to do with the research into Self-Generated Mana, which was why I only dabbled in it. It was human nature to want to try something interesting discovered during research, but such attempts could only serve as a diversion. I couldn't afford to waste my primary energy on this right now.
Focusing on the goal was what I needed to do.
Following the failure of the "Martial Body Cultivation Composite Rune" attempt, even more complex patterns began to manifest alongside the Body Cultivation runes.
These were Totems.
The power of a Totem was less of a "force" and more of a "sublimation."
Initially, the power of the Totem spread into my Body Cultivation Domain, even providing a boost to my Five Senses. Or rather, it wasn't a simple "boost," but a more wondrous form of "resonance."
Five Senses Perception belonged to the perception pathway, one of the most primitive abilities of Body Cultivation, and it was also a way to understand Body Cultivation itself.
Originally, a Self-Awakened Body Cultivator had no specific abilities. Once I became aware of my own body, I gained absolute domination over it. This was both an "extension" of the Self-Awakened Body Cultivator's power and an "understanding" of it.
The more I understood it, the more the Totem could interpret it from another angle.
It was as if, in a normal state, I understood the concept of "speaking." The Totem would then represent the concepts brought about by speaking, such as "volume," "meaning," "tone," "emotion," and so on.
The Totem was a derivation from another dimension based on that foundation. Thinking of it as a "boost" or "extra power" was not the essential expression of a Totem, but rather an interpretation of the Totem from a certain perspective.
Since the power of the Totem influenced the Self-Awakened Body Cultivator and its extended powers, and Body Arts could receive the Totem's "boost," what did that mean?
It meant that the power of Body Arts directly influenced the essence of Body Cultivation power—the Self-Awakened Body Cultivation that sat atop the essence of life.
And I had tested it: only Body Arts that resonated with a Martial Body Cultivation Rune had the possibility of being "boosted" by a Totem.
Thus, the Martial Rune was the "bridge" that created the relationship between Body Cultivation power and Body Arts.
Therefore... theoretically, by continuously practicing Body Arts, these techniques that influenced the essence of life could eventually construct "Self-Awakened Body Cultivation" upon one's own life essence!
But this would undoubtedly require an almost infinite number of Body Arts and the resonance of Martial Runes to construct such an ability.
No wonder the innate Self-Awakened Body Cultivator was hailed as the ability "standing at the peak of the Body Cultivation path."
It was called the ability where "the starting point is the end of all Body Cultivation paths"... I seemed to understand now just how terrifyingly heaven-defying Dean Mei's description of this ability was.
And I had actually obtained this ability through that method, almost by coincidence. To others, it looked like I had simply "died" once.
At the time, I couldn't understand why even a Transcendent Witch would be willing to experience death just to gamble on a feat that was almost impossible to repeat. Looking at it now, even if the odds were low, the price was only dying once. But if you succeeded... that was Self-Awakened Body Cultivation!
The risk-to-reward ratio was simply staggering. It was no wonder Dean Mei said the cost of death was one's own responsibility. She knew very well that this success could not be replicated.
While it was nearly impossible for an average person to construct "Self-Awakened Body Cultivation," constructing Self-Generated Mana had become a possibility.
If Self-Awakened Body Cultivation was the "origin point" that could infinitely extend along the Body Cultivation path, then Self-Generated Mana was a derivation of an ability constructed upon that origin. There was a world of difference between the two in terms of "Rank" and "difficulty."
So, my current problem was how to use my understanding of these abilities to construct Self-Generated Mana using the Mana Source Body Cultivation Method.
My study of Body Arts, Martial Runes, and Totems was not meaningless. I was summarizing basic laws and constructing a foundational understanding, from which the means to utilize those laws and understandings would be born.
Those means were the bridges connecting Self-Generated Mana, Body Cultivation methods, and Body Arts.
Behind any skill lay an inexhaustible amount of theoretical knowledge. A skill was merely the integration of that systematic knowledge, expressed and applied at a certain level.
Therefore, mastering a skill was fundamentally inferior to mastering knowledge. The relationship was like that of a "Medicinal Alchemist" and a "Pharmacist." A pharmacist could mix potions according to a recipe, but a medicinal alchemist could explore the roots of knowledge using their understanding and alchemy skills, thereby constantly creating new potion recipes.
Just as I was lost in thought, the door to my Body Cultivation room was suddenly pushed open.
Startled by the noise, I blinked. This room had been specially opened for me by Sister Bai, so only she and I had the keys.
"Sister Bai?" I saw the door open, and the first person to enter was indeed Sister Bai.
Then, my attention was drawn to the several figures behind her. A crowd followed her into the room. There were more than a dozen of them!
With a quick sense, I realized they were all Transcendent Witches.
"Xiao Han! We’ve got a lead!"
Sister Bai spoke suddenly. she didn't even have time to explain who all these Transcendent Witches were or why they were here.
But while I was shocked, the witches who followed her were equally stunned.
They were among the few Body Cultivation Witches in the academy, or witches who had practiced the Body Cultivation path. They had naturally heard of the witch named Bai Yu—a powerful, newly ascended Saint Realm Body Cultivation Witch who possessed Time Sense.
The Mana Source Body Cultivation Method she proposed, along with the idea of using Mana Sources to create Body Arts, had drawn them together to work toward this goal. Now, after integrating the wisdom of all these Body Cultivation Witches, they had managed to find some ideas and pathways.
And so, they had followed Bai Yu here. After all, they were very curious to meet the witch who had come up with such a miraculous idea in Bai Yu's description.
But now that they were here, their gazes were all fixed on the multiple Martial Runes manifesting around that figure!
And those strange patterns that seemed to thread through the Martial Runes... That... that couldn't be a Totem, could it?
So many traces of Body Cultivation runes...
And such a rare Body Cultivation Totem...
Those things were practically blinding them!